Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 1.18 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted

Plut. Mor., Sentiments Concerning Nature 1.18 — Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch; served verbatim

OF A VACUUM. All the natural philosophers from Thales to Plato rejected a vacuum. Empedocles says that there is nothing of a vacuity in nature, nor any thing superabundant. Leucippus, Democritus, Demetrius, Metrodorus, Epicurus, that the atoms are infinite in number ; and that a vacuum is infinite in magnitude. The Stoics, that within the compass of the world there is no vacuum, but beyond it the vacuum is infinite. Aristotle,* that the vacuum beyond the world is so great that the heaven has liberty to breathe into it, for the heaven is fiery.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Demetrius — a life Democritus — a candidate entry Epicurus — a candidate entry Metrodorus — a candidate entry Plato — a life Thales — a life

Of Those Sentiments Concerning Nature With Which Philosophers Were Delighted, Plutarch — translated by John Dowel (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)